February 15, 2008

And now, your turn to have a say in ILS interfaces…

I’ve had my head down for the past couple of weeks for various reasons, but I’m happy to surface again and announce that the ILS discovery interface group that I discussed in my last post has produced a new draft of our recommendations, which you can download from our wiki. (MS Word format, 43 pages.) This is the version we’ll be taking to Code4lib, to our March meeting with vendors and developers (which I’m happy to report has broader attendance now), and possibly to other venues as well. (I’ll announce any further public presentations and discussions here.) We’ll use the feedback and discussion we hear at those venues to shape the final draft.

But you don’t have to travel anywhere to give us feedback. If you’re interested in standard interfaces for building cool discovery applications on top of the ILS (either as an ILS provider or an ILS client), we want to hear from you! Some relevant questions:

Which of the functions mentioned are most important to you?

What have we missed that’s important to you?

Do you know of, or can you recommend, specific implementations and/or standards for these functions that we haven’t mentioned in the draft?

Are you working on, or interested in working on, more specific bindings, or reference implementations, of these functions? (And if you are, can we see?)

Do you have an interesting discovery application we should know about that could make good use of ILS data and services? (And again, can we see?)

What are the best ways to cultivate partnerships and developer communities to move these recommendations forward, and evolve them appropriately?

I’m very interested in hearing from you, whether here, on our Wiki, or in our meetings.